‘There is. It kept ringing, so she had it cut off,’ Lily says, taking another large gulp of champagne, as though it were lemonade.
‘Well, I wanted to be here,’ he says.
Nana’s face is lit up like a Christmas tree. She always adored Conor, just like all the women in this family have at one point or another. The man I see now in the doorway – looking a little lost – reminds me of the boy he was when we first met. There are some memories we can never outrun.
It was a hot summer’s day when we all first saw nine-year-old Conor Kennedy with his bucket and spade. He was sitting alone, on what we had come to think of as our beach, just opposite Seaglass. It was as though he were trespassing. Blacksand Bay is a public part of the coastline, but nobody ever visits this particular stretch of black sand. It is too difficult to get to without scrambling down the cliff, and there are plenty of signs about the dangers of swimming in the sea. I don’t believe in love at first sight, but something at first sight happened to the women in my family that day. All of us.
I was four, Lily was eight, and Rose was nine. We lived in a world of our own during those childhood summers at Seaglass, while my father was busy touring the real one. Nancy would drop us off in July and reappear in August, leaving us alone with Nana for the weeks in between. On the rare occasions we dared to ask where our mother went when she left us, the answer was always the same: somewhere else. My sisters missed her more than I did. But then I’ve always loved Seaglass, it’s the only place that has ever really felt like home.
Strangers were a strange sight in Blacksand Bay. We all stopped and stared that day, including Nana, at this perfect-looking boy sitting on our beach. So out of place, he seemed to fit right in. Lily was the first one to speak, as usual. It wasn’t exactly Shakespeare, but it was the question we all wanted to ask.
‘Who are you?’
The boy glanced in our direction, looking unimpressed. ‘What’s it to you?’
Lily’s hands formed fists and found their way to her hips. ‘We live here.’
Conor looked the same age as Rose but acted a lot older. He stood up, dusted the sand from his hands and copied Lily’s stance. ‘Yeah? Well, I live here too.’
He took a yo-yo from his pocket and started playing with it, without taking his eyes off us.
Things get a little hazy after that. Sometimes our memories reframe themselves.
Nana bridged the gap between herself and the boy, leaving us behind. She’d seen the bruises on his neck, the shadows beneath his eyes – the details only age teaches you to translate. She asked him where he lived, and he explained that he and his father had just moved into a cottage along the coast.
‘What about your mother?’ she asked.
Nine-year-old Conor stared at her, and the yo-yo went down and up several more times while he decided how to answer. ‘I don’t have a mother anymore.’
‘Our parents are away all the time too,’ said Lily, misunderstanding.
Nana invited Conor to come across the causeway and have lemonade with us, she wanted to call his father to tell him that the boy was safe. Things didn’t used to be how they are now; children didn’t know they might need to worry about an adult offering them a cold drink on a hot day. Conor said yes. Sometimes I wish he’d said no. I remember him walking across the causeway with us for the first time, still yo-yoing as though his little life depended on it. He was officially the most fascinating creature four-year-old me had ever seen.
Our new neighbour lived a mile away, but that isn’t far at all when you are a child and in search of company. Conor didn’t have any other children to play with, and sisters are rarely satisfied to be with one another when someone more interesting comes along. He became a permanent fixture in our lives, and I think I might have fallen in love with him that day. I liked the taste of his name in my mouth and on my tongue, so much so I would whisper it to myself on the days he didn’t come to visit. It felt like snacking between meals. That chance meeting with Conor and his yo-yo changed the shape of my family forever.
We spend our youth building sandcastles of ambition, then watch as life blows sands of doubt over our carefully crafted turrets of wishes and dreams, until we can no longer see them at all. We learn to settle instead for flattened lives, residing inside prisons of compromise. A little relieved that the windows of the world we settled for are too small to see out of, so we don’t have to stare at the castle-shaped fantasies of who we might have been.
There are two kinds of attractive people in the world: those who know that’s what they are, and those who don’t. Conor Kennedy knows it. His good looks gifted him an unshakeable confidence in life, the kind very few mere mortals experience, and fear of failure is a stranger he has yet to meet. He wears his stubble like a mask, always dresses in scruffy jeans teamed with smart shirts, and his blonde hair is long enough to hide his blue eyes when it falls over his face. He doesn’t look like a journalist, but that’s what he is. Thirty-something going on fifty, and addicted to his job.